Why I Love Anime and Manga, pt. 1

Yes, the end of 2009 is upon us: time to reflect on what we’re grateful for, what we regret, what we hope to do better next year…you know, sort of like all the other holidays. In that spirit, I thought I would share with you guys why I sometimes (read:always) talk about anime, manga and other modern Japanese stuff as if it weren’t just enjoyable, but profoundly significant. Don’t worry, this won’t be one of those silly, look-at-me-I-went-to-college exercises that you see in books with titles such as The Simpsons and Philosophy and James Bond and Philosophy. If anything, it’s the opposite: I think the story of anime and manga (hereafter animanga, because I never liked having to refer to them separately) is quite simple, that any critic worth his salt could piece it together easily…if they could just bring themselves to take it seriously.

This is part one, in which I don’t actually talk about animanga at all.

Most of you know that I studied abroad in Japan a few years ago. It was probably the happiest four months of my life. But while I’ve been an armchair otaku since junior high school, the visit didn’t have personal significance for me until a certain event.

It was the same with pretty much all my fellow students: totally neglecting our studies, we lazed around, drank too much, laughed about how weird everything was. Then it came time for our one official excursion together: a trip to Hiroshima. This wasn’t something I was looking forward to, as my time in Tokyo (especially visits to the controversial Yasukuni shrine, where war criminals like Hideki Tojo are enshrined as Shinto gods) had convinced me Japan liked dodging its own war guilt. I knew about the bomb, and I didn’t want a lot of sentimentality forced down my throat. Or, so I thought at the time.

Above: the “Atomic Dome” in Hiroshima, three guesses how it got that way

The center of Hiroshima, today a very lovely city, is its peace park, with the famous paper cranes dedicated to the memory of Sadako Sasaki, and a museum cataloguing the devastation of the atomic bomb. Nobody walked out of that museum the same as when they walked in. It was a hot day, and we stood outside the exit in attitudes of total exhaustion. Nobody said very much.

Above: Sadako’s cranes

I don’t want to talk about what I saw in there, except that I thought I was prepared; I wasn’t. But the atomic bombs were far from the only domestic tragedy of wartime Japan: more people were killed in a single night of firebombing in Tokyo than in Hiroshima. Pretty much every large city, except Kyouto, was bombed into rubble; if you go to Japan and travel around, most of what you see was probably built in the last fifty years. Of course, Japan wasn’t the only country to suffer atrocities during one of the darkest periods of human history, but I’m not interested in assigning guilt: this got me interested in the ramifications of the defeat in post-war Japanese culture. In retrospect, those ramifications are pretty obvious, but sometimes it’s worthwhile pointing out the obvious.

Above: the IJN Nagato, Yamamoto’s flagship

Before the war, there was some justification to Japan’s hope, however tragic, that it could dominate the world. It alone of Asian powers had tight political unity; its scholars had meticulously studied Western industry, science, religion and philosophy. The Imperial Army (and especially Navy) was a terrifying killing machine; and ironically, the very standard of that navy now graces the background of the page you’re looking at. Just pause to imagine that: for a moment, and leaving Europe out of the equation, there was a chance that Japan and not America would be the pre-eminent world power. Again, I’m not judging whether that was a moral goal; but Japan and all of Asia was faced with cultural obliteration, before the economic power of the West on the one hand, and the absolute Truth-Claim of the Judeo-Christian tradition (which, however irreligious we might become, still basically shapes Western foreign policy). Asia had to provide some answer to that; and Japan thought it had.

Overnight, all of that was gone. Not only was the country in ruins, but its claim to provide truth not only for itself, but for the whole human race, was shattered. If great suffering produces great art, it should be no surprise that I find the genesis here of modern Japanese art. But where do you go from there? For a long time, the answer seemed to be: you can’t. It’s impossible to go on after a defeat of that magnitude.

Above: this may not be a representative picture of post-war Japan, but it’s still pretty suggestive

While Japanese industry was pulling itself together with incredible resolve to launch Japan to a new kind of supremacy (and stereotypes that the Japanese work too hard are rooted, I think, in this obvious reality), Japanese art was in despair. Most of my favorite Japanese authors–Yasunari Kawabata, Yukio Mishima, Osamu Dazai, Ryunosuke Akutagawa–were suicides. Kawabata won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and his work was praised for the “Japanese sensibility” it expressed; but his novels, in his own words, were “elegies,” mourning for a world irrevocably lost. Japanese art enjoyed a vogue in the west even before Sailor Moon, but that appreciation had the uncomfortable quality of the gloating victor: Japan was cast as a refined, elegant, beautiful corpse.

Above: novelist Osamu Dazai, genius and suicide

This sort of Orientalist trash is still common in criticism. But now, along comes animanga, which intellectuals still treat (with the exception of Hayao Miyazaki) as if only a few nerds in Akihabara liked it.

I’m sick of trying to persuade people simply that animanga isn’t all perverted because of a few isolated incidents of tentacle rape. In part two of this article, I want to put forward that it is the most interesting thing happening in art today: that we are witnessing nothing less than the rebirth of a nation.

Stay tuned!